Who. Kirill Serebrennikov (Rostov-on-Don, 1969) is a Russian television, film and theater director, TV presenter.
That. The ballet ‘Nureyev’, directed by Serebrennikov, was withdrawn from the Bolshoi Theater’s repertoire due to the law banning “LGBT propaganda”, which was tightened last year.
Because. The director has repeatedly opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The most famous Soviet dancer of the 20th century is too gay for Russia today. Even though he’s dead. The Bolshoi Theater has permanently canceled a ballet about Russian dance legend Rudolf Nureyev. The production is directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, one of Russia’s most innovative and successful directors, who left the country last year after Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale attack on Ukraine. The Bolshoi Theater has admitted it is pulling the play because it contravenes the country’s anti-gay laws, which were tightened last year as Putin proclaimed his new crusade against fascism in Ukraine.
The Bolshoi Theater suspended performances of the Nureyev ballet almost a year ago. Many have not been surprised that this work definitively disappears, taking into account that the name of its director has already been erased by the authorities. In May 2022, the theater’s website removed the mention that the director of the performance was Kirill Serebrennikov. The Russian Ministry of Culture justified it by saying that the names of those who “renounced Russia” in “difficult times” like the current ones disappear from the posters of cultural institutions by “pure logic”.
As the director of the Bolshoi, Vladimir Urin, admitted on Wednesday, this definitive cancellation is related to the tightening of a 2013 law against so-called “gay propaganda.” An amendment passed in December 2022 expanded the ban on “the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.” Initially it was applied to children. Now you can’t show homosexuality to adults either.
‘Nureyev’ is inspired by the life of ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev, and its use of stage nudity and profane language has outraged Russian conservatives. “Issues related to the promotion of non-traditional values are discussed absolutely unequivocally,” admits the general director of the theater.
Nureyev’s premiere took place in December 2017 and soon became one of the biggest theater events of the year. In the final stretch before the premiere, the performance was being prepared without Serebrennikov, who at the time was under house arrest accused of embezzlement from the Gogol Center theater in Moscow. In March of last year, Serebrennikov was allowed to leave Russia, where he had been found guilty in 2020.
His supporters say the sentence was revenge for his criticism of authoritarianism and homophobia under Putin. The director has repeatedly opposed what the Kremlin still calls a ‘Russian military operation’ in Ukraine.
Serebrennikov’s exile seems like a recreation of the rise and fall of the protagonist of his ballet: Rudolf Nureyev’s great pirouette was precisely to escape from the Soviet Union. While on tour in Paris in 1961 he refused to return to the USSR, for which he was convicted of treason and sentenced in absentia to seven years. Nureyev worked successfully in the West and between 1983 and 1989 directed the ballet group of the Paris Opera. Precisely one of the plots of Serebrennikov’s production talks about the artist’s relationship with his lover, the Danish dancer Eric Brown. A misunderstood passion in Moscow then and also now.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project